Yahoo Currently Active Stock Symbol List

Hi I'm looking to get hold of a global stock symbol list in Yahoo format (US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, UK etc) , it's a tonne of symbols... does anyone know where I can get hold of a currently active list preferably in some kind of text file or excel? I can manipulate the symbol format in Excel if it's not idential to Yahoo layout that's not a problem, just need to make sure the list is current.
Thanks a lot if anyone has any ideas.
Ridu.

what a nightmare trying to get up and running in python . I knew there was a reason I avoided it.

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I found it to be quite the opposite...

programming in python allowed me to tackle the subject of software development after avoiding for 10 years following a bad experience in college with COBOL and PASCAL...
compared to COBOL python is a wonder... no need to spend line after line setting memory apart and preparing the variables before the first line of logic...
for setting up the environment, i simply got anaconda, which includes most of the required libraries as well as spyder and ipython gui's

i program in a number of languages, and while python looks very powerful, i'm in no mood to lean a new one.

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There is more than a few banks that still have their systems built in COBOL believe it or not! But I agree with you, it SHOULD be limited to the storage room of some museum.

About my script, most if the heavy lifting is done by the regular expressions, and these are the same on most languages, so it should be easy to extract the good stuff from the script and move it to java, c, shell, r, matlab, etc...